Just to warn everyone, this is going to be the last #WriteMonday. I was thinking about it, and since I generally work on things on Monday (and so never really have a consistent time when I post on Mondays), I’m going to move the weekly update to Tuesdays instead. That way I can do all my writing without trying to remember to post on here simultaneously! 🙂

Fitting in with this change, I also decided to move the monthly Tuesday Book Talk to Thursdays. So starting this month, that will now be happening on the last Thursday of the month instead of the last Tuesday.

My thoughts led me off in some unexpected directions: the original story I envisioned had a man looking for his betrothed, but I wasn’t really clear on how he realized she was missing. Thinking through that, I thought it made the most sense that they separated because of an argument and he realized she was missing when he went back to apologize to her. But the more I thought about their argument, the less sense the story made as I had originally envisioned it.

What made more sense within the story was to have the lady looking for her betrothed instead. That meant I had to change some aspects of the characters I had originally envisioned, too. At its most basic, she was originally going to be a revenant, but now he would be instead (revenants are the soul that remains when a zombie is made – I talk a little bit about it in this post from 2015, and wrote a short story dealing with revenants and zombies for Apocalypse Madness). Making that change led to some unexpected worldbuilding problems within City of the Dead that I had to work through (specifically whether the world’s magic is capable of affecting a revenant). That question took an unexpectedly long time to answer (about two days!) But that was okay, because now that I have answered it, I feel a lot more confident about this new version of the story. And now that most of the worldbuilding is out of the way, I’ve been able to start re-plotting the story. That has (of course) kicked up a few more worldbuilding things I need to think about, which will hopefully take a bit less time than the last one did. But no matter how long it takes, once I’ve figured all of this out I think both the story and the setting will be much stronger!

Once I’m finished with working through the plot and the few worldbuilding kinks, I’ll get back to actually writing the story. Unfortunately the changes I’ve made mean that most of what I had already written will be scrapped. But that’s okay, these things happen (remember when I was working on that story for the Dark Crystal Author Quest? I wrote 5+ drafts of that story, many of which involved huge structural edits like this!) The main thing is that no matter how many drafts this takes, I end up writing the strongest story I can! 🙂